For Cuisinart, AI-Generated Ads Are As Handy As A Kitchen Blender

Cuisinart, owned by Conair, found that AI-generated video ads outperformed its in-house video in a one-month A/B test on Amazon, according to Kelsey Smithuysen, Amazon marketing director for Conair. The brand, a beta tester for Amazon's new video creative agent, saw the AI video deliver better click-through and site conversion rates, though the AI still struggles with fine details like buttons and text on appliances. Smithuysen said that if AI quality continues to improve, Cuisinart could use AI-generated videos as-is within a year.

Cuisinart’s marketing team has been eager to take advantage of generative AI-based creative. The problem has been that, until recently, generative creative just didn’t quite pass muster with the company’s brand baselines, Kelsey Smithuysen, Amazon marketing director for Conair which owns Cuisinart , told AdExchanger. The green would be not quite the correct Cuisinart shade of green. Logos, buttons or numbers and text on an appliance were liable to be off. “And that was just static banner ads,” Smithuysen said. Mention a few products Cuisinart is known for. Could tie one of these products into the headline. However, with rapid improvements in the quality of AI-generated video output, Cuisinart was ready to test Amazon’s new video creative agent. Cuisinart was a beta tester for the agent that launched this year. For the Amazon marketing team in particular, generative creative is an important tool, Smithuysen said. The Cuisinart brand marketing team plans ahead for the whole year, securing studio space and other production set-ups months in advance. Whereas the Amazon team is “changing product priorities pretty rapidly.” Most brand marketers know by Q1 what new products will launch in Q4, and what major campaign strategies will look like. Amazon is constantly changing and marketers can’t say what next week might bring, in terms of what works on the platform. As part of its Amazon creative beta test, Cuisinart and its agency, Global Overview, put equivalent spend behind a video produced in-house by the brand and a video generated by Amazon and ran identical, concurrent campaigns for one month. The AI generated video involved fine-tuning one video from a list of a few proposed by the creative agent. The results landed solidly in favor of the generative creative. Nikhil Nanivadekar, Amazon Ads principal engineer for generative AI and agentic AI, told AdExchanger that its creative agent isn’t exactly devising entirely new or out-of-the-box ideas when it generates successful videos. The agent is digesting all the ads the brand has run in the past and which of those creatives worked particularly well. It is “grounded in the signals” provided by the brand, he said, and thus will reflect the company’s video catalogue – at least the ads that the AI deems most successful – rather than producing something bold or outlandish. The main benefit of generative AI, he said, is to continue to produce new material that’s akin to what works but isn’t exactly the same. Shoppers become adept at developing ad blindness for creatives they’ve seen numerous times, he explained. Perhaps even more compelling than the incremental click-through and site conversion numbers from the A/B test, is the pace of improvement in AI content production, and with Amazon’s agent and in general, Smithuysen said. A year ago, producing a static image for an ad was unreliable and frankly not worth it, she said. Now, the AI gets the brand most of the way to a full-fledged video ad, just with some post-production fixes by prompt and upfront configuration work. “Another year from now, we can definitely see ourselves using the videos just as they are coming out of the AI tool if they continue to progress in the way they’ve been progressing,” she said. What’s next for Amazon’s Creative Agent? For Cuisinart, a priority now is to learn to increase the pace of production and to expand the creative chops of their generative videos. The AI-generated video that succeeded in its A/B test over a branded campaign is pretty basic. It features a family two adults and a kid in the kitchen, and there’s a narrator’s voice talking about last-minute dinner or party prep. There are a few product shots the 14-cup food processor, specifically that are essentially stills with a little sound and motion, and which demo basic features. And like Smithuysen noted, there is something juuuust not quite right about the depictions of buttons and text on devices. But totally serviceable. I have the video and was planning to embed Also, Smithuysen said the brand is thinking about more commercial-type use cases, rather than the product demo creative that’s been generated so far. If someone’s purchases or other tracking history indicates they’ve moved into a new apartment, the company might feature smaller, compact items. If someone is going to college or appears to be picking up home cooking, those are also different phases of life that could determine which item and environment is right for the ad. And she noted that with continued improvement in generative video quality, the ‘people’ in AI-based ads can have conversations – right now a brand is safer going with a narrator-style approach. The generative ads only work with Amazon Ads, so it’s not like the brand could take the same video and reuse it one YouTube, Instagram, Walmart, etc. if they had a bona fide hit with Amazon. On the other hand, Smithuysen said there’s really no need to transplant platform-generated ads. There may come a day when the look and feel of Cuisinart ads is slightly different platform by platform, based mainly on the ads having been produced by different AI tech. Amazon shoppers prefer a different look and feel of ad then other platforms, she said. The whole point of the ad being effectively tailored, she added, is that there should be “some form of difference” in the ad content based on the platform. For Amazon Ads, the next step in generative creative comes down to making it even easier to produce the ad, so to speak, and to go live with a campaign. In June, for instance, Amazon Ads debuted a “one-click video generation” tool, Nanivadekar said. The current system can feel a bit chatty for brand marketers, who must prompt the tool in plain English and continue to do so to finetune the video. Now, Nanivadekar said the platform will prompt advertisers who are back-and-forthing with the creative agent: “Hey, based on what we are seeing, what if we could actually generate these videos with just one click?”